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Questions for Entry Level PC Techs?
Rick Zeman asks: "For the first time ever, I have to interview and hire (I'm not management, so an exception is being made) what we call a 'PC Technician', which is an entry-level IT person. While actual computer knowledge and how we do things can be taught, how to think, and the aptitude for troubleshooting can't be. In the readers' experiences, what are the best (legal in the US!) questions to ask an entry-level candidate to really evaluate them? They don't have the resumes, the skills, or the experience yet, so I think they have to be judged on other factors that are harder to qualify."
I'm not sure what is entailed by 'technician', but I'm assuming that they will need *at least* some troubleshooting skills. Even non technical ones. I remember when I got a job doing tech support and the preliminary interviewer asked me a question: "I'm thinking of a product in a grocery store, find out what it is in less than 15 questions."
They didn't care that I had any IT background; they could provide me the training to fix issues, but I needed first to have the skills to find out what they were. I would suggest following a similar pattern. You've got people with little experience, skills, and knowledge concerning the subject matter, but the basics of logical deduction will get you the most value as an employer.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
give him a big box of junk parts, see how many working computers he can get in a couple hours. At least two you would think. Award bonus points for testing the power supplies before attaching them to the mobo and devices, just leave a meter laying around see if he grabs it. Watch for stuff like putting on the grounding strap first, etc.. Throw in some ringers in the box of course, and a mobo with bad (bulging or burst) caps, see if he spots it. Stuff like that there. That and just talking to him about computers should weed out the posers. Ask him to brag on the machines he's built, see if he knows off the top of his head all the parts, etc, then do the hands on test after you get your field narrowed down a little. You didn't mention what environment he might be working in, but if windows, then see if he can troubleshoot normal consumer click on anything FUBARS. In fact, you can have fun with that, just stick a working non firewalled vanilla install of ths or that windows installation on the net for an hour and go find the dodgiest links you can find and click on everything. Install a ton of screensavers and whatnot. Give the final test on that machine, see how clean he can get it, and what tools he asks for for troubleshooting. That should be enough to go through the selectees. Even if they can't get everything, you'll see if they can proceed in a logical manner.
I spent the last year in Paris working at a school as an entry level technician and often had to solve problems that I didn't know anything about. The skill to doing this is being a fast learner and also to know how to go about solving a new problem.
I suggest you give them a problem which they probably don't know how to solve and ask them to talk through their process. This could involve some quick research on google or using common sense, etc etc. Its feasible that someone with very little tech experience could do this job as long as they have a quick brain and good common sense.
The next most important thing is social skills and the ability to get on with their users. I know how common it is to have to deal with people who know nothing about computers. You could play the role of a retarded user, or even better, get someone else involved who really is a novice and get your interviewee to train them to do something. You observe their social skills and how they interact with the novice.
1) Ask them hard question, get them to talk through their process of trying to solve it
2) Give them a task of training a novice to do something, or act as a novice yourself. Ask very novicey questions to see if you can frustrate them. Patience is a virtue needed for IT tech jobs.
3) Get them to talk through a spyware infestation, a virus infestation. Make up some hypotheticals to ask them. Example: Someone calls you up and say's their internet is broken, what do you ask them first? Go through the scenario step by step and see what they do.
It's fairly easy to see quite quickly who are the people who are sharp thinkers with good inter-personal skills. It's also fairly easy to pick those people up who know what they're talking about. Ask them to recommend a virus scanner, if they say Norton, kick them out of our office immediately! They should know about programs like AVG, Avast, Stinger.
I've been in a similar situation, i've hired several apprentices for my company.
In case you're unfamiliar how an apprenticeship works:
It's part of one of the possible education roads in switzerland. At age 16, you start an apprenticeship in a company, which usually is 2-4 years (depending on the amount of skill of the job required). An apprenticeship requires attendance at a public school for one or two days a week. The pay is usually very weak, from 450 - 1000 CHF / Month. At the end of the apprenticeship, there's a standardized test.
Since people start at age 16, they have no qualification whatsoever (except that they finished public school), and as an additional drawback, you can't fire apprentices unless they SERIOUSLY fuck up (stealing from the company or something like that, or fucking up in school several times in a row).
The only thing i've paid much attention to is interest. Interest in IT can vary, e.G.:
An avid gamer, maxing out the performance of his video card, by working with lots of settings? Creating custom ini files for you game?
A young Linux zealot, telling my windows is a bad thing.
Writing programs?
Young, interested people are raw diamonds. They don't understand professional IT yet, and they have a lot to learn. While it is my job to help them to learn, the bunch of stuff is what they have to do alone. Just provide the infrastructure and support. It doesn't matter much what kind of skills they already have, since most of them don't help on their job - but most of my apprentices are more up to date on PC/Consumer hardware than iam.
Interest is all that matters. Someone who is willing to learn will be able to do everything you want him to, it just takes some time.
There's an important second skill, and that is social skills. You always have customers, be they internal (like in an enterprise) or external (in my case, SMB support).
An apprentice will have to learn how to deal with customers. In my case, i go to customers with them, let them stand aside (for about half a year). After that, they will have the skills to solve small problems on their own. The next step is to learn to deal with the customer. Delegate tasks, have them solve the problem on their own, report to the customer. And as a last step, send the on their own way.
This process takes about 3 years with an apprentice - you can shorten this ALOT if someone has at least a bit of previous experience.
And another tiny bit i've learned. Never solve a problem for your apprentice, if time is not critical. Give hints, push them in the right direction, let them figure out the solution on their own.
Never lie to them - while it is sometimes necessary to adjust the truth for a customer, never lie to your apprentices - there's nothing worse than learning the wrong things.
Complex calculus. Programming language grammar (give example EBNF, and tell if it comforms). The market is horrible for anyone technical, and you'll have many very qualified technical people willing to work for near minimum wage. It beats flipping burgers for them. You can get the best for just a bit over minimum wage. It's really bad out there for technical people.
It depends... for this sort of position most places I've worked do not have the time to take somebody for ground zero (i.e. a novice user) and train them up to technician level.
On the other hand, there was one place I worked (major university) where we needed a full time tech badly, couldn't pay the big bucks, and so we started looking internally. I found that one of our admin assistants was well into power user territory, had oodles of common sense, and could function without pissing off the faculty. I started talking to her about what she'd done before working for the university, and it turns out she'd been an armorer in the army for four years, and was in charge of doing detailed maintenance of everything from Barettas to fifty cals and grenade launchers. What did this have to do with IT? Nothing. But it showed that she wasn't afraid of taking stuff apart and working on it.
I started her out with various installation scenarios of Windows 98, NT4 workstation and 2000 (this was awhile back of course) and walked her through basic concepts like the boot sequence and POST, device manager, IRQs, memory specs, etc. I probably spent about an hour a day with her and while she was had down time from the admin assistant position she'd play with a couple of junkers I'd given her. Things progressed (antivirus, registry, etc) and a few months of playing an hour a day in addition to doing her paper pushing job she passed the A+ which gave me enough ammunition to get her reclassified as a support tech and bump her pay up a bit. Oh yeah, and she was in her mid-40's at the time, so don't get the image that this was a kid. She's the best tech I'd ever had working for me and I'm really sad I couldn't get her to jump ship with me to another employer. She's played the cert game and nailed an associate's in IT. Anyway, anecdote complete... now:
I had to interview nine wannabe techs from the local community college who were ten weeks away from graduation (AAS in Information Technology). They were all guys between 19 and 23. This two year school is a full blown state sponsored community college, not ITT or something to that effect. My senior tech and I interviewed these kids and it was really, really sad. I'm not going to bore you with the details, but seven out of the nine seemed to have a serious lack of social skills. I work with some very assertive professionals and you have to be clear and concise in your communications with them. The candidate's technical skills were sorely lacking as well.
I'm not making this up: these guys had supposedly co-op'd four quarters at other employers, and here are one line summaries of the most promising three we had:
One guy repaired coin-ops at Chuck E Cheese. He had experience reinstalling Windows, and that was about it. Since I'm an old school electronics tech this was my favorite to hire.
One guy had installed modems in four different machines at his last coop job, and that was his hardware experience. That was it. He had reinstalled Windows a few times with no troubleshooting involved.
The last guy had swapped a hard drive in his own machine once and reloaded Windows.
My first thought was: exactly what are they teaching over there, and what the hell are the coop employers doing? Are they using them as clerks?
My second thought was: the school has got to suck. I was wrong. I'm in Ohio where we have quite a few two year schools and we ran an interview with candidates from a local technical institute, and it was worse. One guy couldn't unbox a Dell and hook it up. I know that fourteen bucks an hour isn't exactly a friggin' mint, but damn, you can't get somebody reliable to set up clients for that in a low cost of living area? The hell of it is, everybody around here is hung up on having a two year degree but I'll bet I could go to the local high school and pull a motivated student who had all of these requirements in spades.
This is a good start. Perhaps the following questions together will make up most of the 1st interview on the technical side:
-When was your first experience with a computer - what kind of computer was it?
-Whats the most complicated thing you've done on a computer, even if it didn't work?
-(as stated above)Describe your home network and computers.
-What kind of experience do you think you'll gain and what type of experience do you want to gain from this?
-Lets say we work with you and get you a Microsoft Certification, what would you do once you had that certification? (Assuming this is a windows shop)
All that on top of a personality quiz including how they handle stress and repeated questions - maybe even ask them something repeatedly throughout the interview process to see how they handle it. For the second interview of the most likely candidates, like someone else said, computers, computers...
1 computer, in pieces, in a box. Put it together. It can be a junked computer - this just tests their knowledge of computer hardware.
1 computer, connected to a printer and some sort of bad device (cdrom unplugged from IDE, but powers up, ejects, etc...) - have them hook up the printer how your techs would (ie: without the OEM drivers - if you use networked based printers, you can decide how hard you want to be based on the first interview) and then have them find out what device is having problems. Ask them what steps they would take to fix it.
Continue asking that stupid question you keep repeating to see how they react. The first eye roll, sigh, etc should give you a reasonable example of how they'll handle all those stupid questions in the real world. Expect them to look a little confused the first couple of times.
Time both of the computer quizzes and see what you get between each person. Match these up to personalities and scores on the 1st side of the interview. I would also bring in an accomplice to help give a secondary recommendation and have them ask a few of the same stupid questions a few times. At some point, tell these poor people why you've asked the same questions over and over - either at their final interview (just before "we'll call you") or when they react the wrong way.
One question they asked me at my first tech job interview;
If you were going to buy a PC, would you go for a big-name supplier like Dell, or a home-built system from a smaller shop?
The correct answer is any, or none! But you learn a lot from it. If they want a big supplier like Dell, you can ask them why; it's because of a large technical support base, corporate contracts and so on, and some guarantee of reliability (i.e. maybe the laptop battery would explode but they can do a recall).
If they say a small independant PC shop in the high street, you can ask why you eschewed the huge technical support. I said this one, because I really would.. personal service is always good. Walking into the store with your broken PC is a lot more friendly. You can have the guy at the independant store walk through what went wrong and it helps you learn why so you don't do it again. That, in my view, is better than Dell collect-and-return, where you just get back a working PC. But then I'm a tech; if you were a home user, you'd probably be better with Dell.
The next question is; Or wouldn't you build it yourself?
Build myself? I used to but I got bored of it. The cost; there is no way you can buy retail the same price as you get from a PC shop or even Dell. You may be able to build the exact machine you want, but you can do this by 'upgrading' a system that's been prebuilt for you. If you buy one with integrated graphics, but want an ATI Radeon X850 GTX-PO-ZZZZ-QUAK or so, buy one. At least the system would have been burned in for you, the components tested to some degree for compatibility and driver stability at either point. Being your own tech support is tedious. Do you really want to spend days of your own time troubleshooting and losing time you could be working or playing on the system?
You just have to ask questions that get a feel for if they understand how people buy, use and break systems. Knowing how to troubleshoot a bunch of simple Windows problems isn't the issue; giving them a PC to work on and see if they can handle it is a bad idea. What if the problem is something they know how to fix, easily, but they get stuck on other simple problems? You're testing competance on specific issues there, not general troubleshooting skills, or even common sense.
Why not go on Google and look for some of the more esoteric ones. I saw someone here said their interviewer made them play 20 questions.. that's a good test but it's a little offputting to some people. Groceries? Huh?
I remember a story about a guy who got taken out for a meal for his interview.. I think at Microsoft. The interview ended when he got his meal on the table and immediately put salt on it without even tasting if it needed it. That would be a bad trait.. if you consider for a moment how that kind of attitude affects the way he'd develop software. I have no idea if it's truly true or not, but it's a good example. Try things that bring out the applicant's general demeanour, see if they are friendly and helpful, or arrogant little pricks who just want to rattle through support cases.
Take a pc apart, put it in a box, see if they can get it together again.
This is exactly what they would do at the university's computer repair shop where I used to work. An applicant was given a box of parts and told to make a computer. Clones were easy, Macs were a huge pain in the a$$--I hated those cases!
...to experience this.
Last time we hired someone, it was a higher level position than just simple "Tech Support", and the applicant was expected to know Active Directory. Though all of them supposedly worked or had worked in IT departments where Active Directory was deployed, none of them knew even the basics of how it worked. Some of them didn't even know what the hell it was.
Not sure if you are going to see this reply, but do you happen to live in a rural area? The talent pool in my area (which is rural) is extremely limited and it's *very* hard to find good people, despite the fact that the money we pay is very high when you compare it to the cost of living here.
I was going to suggest something similar, but just do a fake phone call. One of my first interviews when I was going for PC tech spots the interviewer pretended to be a caller and his monitor did not work. I had to guide him 'over the phone' to get the monitor to work. I had to describe things like what the cable ends looked like to him and also demonstrate a knowlege of common problems with monitors. I think in this cases it was just a dead monitor.
:wq
I keep a box of odd hardware pieces and adapters, connectors and cables. I have them reach in and pull out something at random and describe what it is and what it does.
I explain that good guesses are as revealing to me as actual knowledge or experience.
This is the only way I have found to determin apptitude for troubleshooting. I have had several "A+ certified" graduates fail the box utterly. I have seen MCSE's who could not tell a modem from a network card. And I have trained those who showed good deductive reasoning who went on to own companies or work for big name network and content providers.
Some of the box goodies:
ungerman bass 10 base 2 card
scsi terminators (active and passive)
coax terminators
cisco 2501 cable
null modem cables, (commercial 9 and 25 and handmade with rj45(hp keyed) ends.
offset (sun) serial adapters
propriatary sony cd rom
2.5 to 3.5 ide adapter
floppy drive, hard drives (ide, mfm, rll, scsi, sata)
heat sinks, variety
mainboard standoffs and riser card
breakout box , serial
various processors and ram sticks (sipp, sims, dip, piggyback dip, dimms ect)
crimpers, punch tools, milspec power "y"
66 block, 110 block
all varieties of centronics connectors used on printers, scsi, thicknet, for pc's, macs, sun, NeXt, and SG's.
fiber couplings, rca jacks and cables, RF connectors, (and a handful of CB radio couplers also)
*"Cogito Ergo Liberalis"*
I agree with this.. At my first interview in the big world of IT (with a company everyone here loves to hate*), They sat me in one room with a bucket of lego. Someone built up something, gave it to me and I had to describe down the phone to "the customer" in another room, how to reproduce the thing I had in my hand (they also had a bucket of lego).
:)
Was very good for judging someons communications skills, especially when "the customer" is bing as unhelpful as possible.
A few years later I did the "the customer" part for some other interviewees. Was fun, but scary how many people just cant cope with even that.
*Dont worry, I left over 6 years ago